


Kite

by atria



Category: Tennis no Oujisama | Prince of Tennis
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-02
Updated: 2018-12-02
Packaged: 2019-09-05 13:21:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16811461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atria/pseuds/atria
Summary: “Echizen,” she says. She needs to say something for her dignity. “I asked you to be a pillar to the team and you rose to the occasion.”Echizen looks down at his knees. Shy, she thinks in wonder. She pauses to let the words sink in. “Except you are quite short. For a pillar, I mean.”-1000 words of girl!Tezuka getting high as a kite on painkillers at senior high training camp. Written as an exercise to figure her out, there will likely be more girl Tezuka in the future.





	Kite

If the PE teachers in charge of rules for overnight trips were at all logical, they wouldn’t put boys in one room and girls in another. The matter requires greater attention to detail. 

A ryokan foolproof against sexual misadventure for the high school tennis team must have at least seven rooms. One for Tezuka, Eiko and Fuji, who are straight girl, straight girl and gay boy. One each for Momo, Oishi, Kaidoh and Kawamura, who swing both ways. One for Inui just in case -- he was too busy collecting data on the others to figure himself out. And who knows where Echizen would go.

“Ow,” she says as a finger grazes the fissure on her eyelid. Echizen. She was thinking of him right as he moved. “Speak of the devil.” 

The spill of pills float beside her like lovely river pebbles, and she smiles at them before she realises the blue is the table, and she’s seeing double. She pushes at the bridge of her nose but there are no glasses to be found. Echizen swats at her hand, gently. 

“Buchou,” he huffs. “Hold still.” His fingers close warmly around her wrist. He bends to her again, a q-tip closing in on her eye, and she can’t help but flinch. 

He sighs again and shifts back onto his haunches. “This will hurt more if you move, buchou.” 

“Echizen,” she says. She needs to say something for her dignity. “I asked you to be a pillar to the team and you rose to the occasion.” 

Echizen looks down at his knees. Shy, she thinks in wonder. She pauses to let the words sink in. “Except you are quite short. For a pillar, I mean.”

The rim of his cheek is red where it curves beneath his shut eyes. Her heart twists and opens. She’s a lock come loose. Her hands go to rest on his shoulders and he glances up, eyes bright and mouth slack. He’s laughing at me, she thinks, dismayed. 

“Buchou, I just got taller than you.” 

“Yes, but I’m a girl.” If she is patient, and explains to him exactly how he is wrong, she will not cry. This is how she has stopped herself from crying in front of another living soul since she was nine years old. 

“Hey. I’m sorry.” His finger traces her cheek, and comes away wet. She sees the smudge of it on his fingertip. “You think if you keep talking and thinking about other stuff it’ll help the pain?” 

“Aa,” she says. She is distracted by the clean seams of his nails, the ridges of his fingerprint. Echizen is uniquely identifiable at this distance. The thought is pleasing. 

He looks at her for a moment and she looks back, wondering if she can diagnose his thought from the tilt of his head and the sweep of his brows. He huffs again. “So talk.” Her mind refocuses. She is too busy thinking of what to say to see his hand move. The cotton comes away stark red. Her shut eye is a bright explosion of pain.

“This hurts like hell,” she tells him. He pauses for a moment then his hands go on with their work, so steady, so smooth. He is the best tennis player she knows. She trusts him implicitly, the way she thinks he trusted her at twelve. “I let you play when you were like this a while ago.”

“Three years.” 

“I can’t believe I did that. Did it hurt?” She brings her face closer to his so she can tell if he’s lying. The chuff he makes is a breath on her face. It passes over her as warm and close as skin. He doesn’t move away.

“Sort of. I can’t remember. I really wanted to win.” He sucks his lip between his teeth as his fingers bring a bandage to her skin. She shuts her eye obediently. 

“You could barely see. I can’t believe coach let me,” she muses. She can admit it, now that she’s close to a real adult after years of trying too hard to be one: she did wrong. She let him play after dripping blood all over a tennis court because at age fourteen, she wanted a trophy the way other kids wanted a pet or a piercing. She probably did as much harm. He won the game and she wouldn’t rest later till she made her dream his as well. 

“At least nobody cares about high school nationals that much,” she says wryly when Echizen doesn’t say a word. It’s true. Sometimes it feels like Seigaku is the only team playing seriously on the circuit at all. This excursion is as much an excuse to use up club funds as a real training trip. Wedged into her duffel is a stack of entrance exam practices she hasn’t had the heart to start. Not while her best friends surround her all at once for maybe the last time before they all go their own way. 

The hand dabbing at the skin around her eyes presses in harder. “We’ll win nationals. I don’t care if they don’t care.” When she glances up he’s all but glaring at her. By they he means me, she thinks. 

The role reversal saddens her. “You have bigger things ahead of you,” she tells him. His eyes on her are wide and watchful. “Mada mada, no?”

He doesn’t say a word. Her head is full of the thought, brims with it as though from a wound. She can’t stop. “Sometimes I worry we held you back,” she confesses, and by ‘we’ she means ‘I’. Even high on painkillers she knows to hide. A judder of self-loathing passes through her and she bites her lip not to cry, not for this, not while Echizen is watching her for signs of hurt he might have inflicted with his careful hands and nests of cotton and gauze. 

“That’s crazy,” he says shortly. He’s glaring again, the alcohol he dabbed on the gauze a stroke of heat that thrums in her whole body. She can’t tell pleasure from pain, guilt from hope anymore. He sits back. “I wouldn’t have -- If not for --” His mouth clamps shut. “Y’know what I mean,” he mumbles, lip caught between his teeth. 

“I know,” she says nonsensically. She doesn’t, isn’t sure herself anymore. But she is sure of him. Then she’s the one with a hand in the thick weave of his hair, touching where she’s wanted to touch since she knew what it was to want. 

“I’m done already,” he says, and “I know,” she says again, but she doesn’t move away, and he leans into her hand till she doesn’t know which of them is giving comfort and which receiving, the real roles between them as secret and indistinct as they were the first year they met, and it feels too good to ever stop. 


End file.
